Weredragon

Weredragons are big, half-beast, half-dragon enemies in Heretic. They make their first appearance on E2M1: The Crater. Weredragons, like the player and the gargoyle, can be gibbed if killed by an attack that inflicts significant damage, but because of their high health rating, this is a rare occurrence and can most easily be produced by using a powered-up Firemace.

According to the description in the Heretic manual, ''the Weredragons infest the darkest lairs of the Order. Possessing all of the strength and agility of a tank, these lumbering creatures belch a body-blasting fireball.''

The manual incorrectly states that the player will encounter ghost weredragons. However, this may be a leftover from an earlier build of Heretic.



Tactical analysis
Weredragons attack the player by spitting out fireballs which inflict 4-32 points of damage and are affected by the push of wind. At melee range the weredragon's breath will do damage directly, with slightly less damage potential.

Their skin colour allows them to blend in somewhat in caves and dark areas. They are stealth in dark areas, because neither themselves nor their projectiles light up.

Although the manual's description may suggest that the weredragon is sluggish and not very mobile, it is actually as fast moving as a sabreclaw, making it the joint fastest opponent in Heretic. They are also very fast to attack, so you need to be very quick to react if you're fighting them at close range.

Among non-boss creatures they have the widest hitbox horizontally, and only the undead warrior's is taller, thus their size can both restrict their movement and make them easier to hit compared to other enemies.

When killed, they have a ~33% chance to drop Ethereal Arrows, which provide 10 arrows (15 on skill levels 1 and 5).

Data

 * 1) These tables assume that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and smoke trails are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) Hardcoded exception to infighting negates damage (excepting indirect damage caused by exploding puff pods).

Appearance statistics
In the IWADs the weredragon is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of weredragons per skill level: